Wednesday, October 16, 2013

A true story about false confessions

Former DC police detective Jim Trainum tells reporter Saul Elbein about how his first murder
investigation went horribly wrong. He and his colleagues pinned the crime on the wrong girl, and it
took 10 years and a revisit to her videotaped confession to realize how much, unbeknownst to Jim
at the time, he was one of the main orchestrators of the botched confession.
(28 minutes)

Read the transcript of the segment here or download and listen to the show here.

For a taste, here's the police detective, explaining the realization he had in watching the videotaped interrogation:

I thought I was a very conscientious, very methodical, very detail-oriented detective. And I would never, ever want to feed information or contaminate a suspect. And here I am doing it plain as day....We were only looking for confirmation of what we thought was true, rather than seeking out what the truth really is.

This is important journalism because it shows how wrongful convictions are not necessarily the result of bad faith by police and prosecutors.

Posted at 11:15:35 AM

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The story ends very sadly. When he realized the confession was coerced, he did nothing to help the woman clear her record. She had her kids taken away and wasn't able to work. But he used the experience in his job, training cops about false confessions. Then 20 years (?) later, he talks to her and finally offers to try to help. Talk about too little, too late. Of course she did confess, but if you listen to the story it's hard to blame her.

So the article gives the name of ONE policeman who has a conscience, who admits he did wrong years ago and tried to make things right. Let's compare that to the prosecutors up in Lake Country that KNOWINGLY send and keep innocent men in jail for years just to pad their success rate for the next election.

The more important question for Eric Zorn is the role of bad journalists in wrongful convictions. When you have a case like Anthony Porter, in which journalists like Zorn unquestioningly repeated the claims of wrongful conviction lawyers and activists without checking the facts, then you get murderers put back on the street and no justice for the families of the victims. You also have the lives of top flight detectives ruined. When other cops see detectives getting sued and their investigations dragged through mud in columns like the ones Zorn wrote about this case, policing suffers.

The fact is that many journalists in Chicago are guided by their ideology rather than the principles of journalism. The question shifts from corruption in the police department to corruption in the media. Zorn is one of the worst examples, and, as the Porter case unravels in the coming weeks, this will become painfully clear for him and other journalists.

Consider this. Even after the evidence became clear that there was something terribly wrong about the Porter case, Zorn did nothing. In fact, he attempted to stifle this opposing point of view. Lawyers for Porter were counting on a huge settlement in the case. The detectives turned to their attorney, Walter Jones. Jones originally believed that Porter was wrongfully convicted, like almost everyone else in the city who read Tribune articles on the case. But Jones was willing to listen to the detectives. They walked him through the case, step by step and showed him that the only person who could have killed the victims was Porter. Jones saw it and rejected a settlement. He argued that Porter was the killer as part of his defense strategy, and he won. Afterward, a journalist asked him why Porter got no money. Jones said honestly that he thought Porter was the killer.

Zorn published a stinging, vicious tirade against Jones for making such a claim, for merely expressing his opinion after doing something neither Zorn nor any other Trib journalist had the guts to do: looking at the facts of the case.

This was in 2005. If Zorn had not been so blinded by his anti-police bias, then maybe Alstory Simon, a truly wrongfully convicted person, could have gotten out of prison a long time ago.

For the dozens and dozens of detectives who lives were ruined in this and other fraudulent wrongful conviction cases, the pressure on Zorn is long awaited and welcome. And it's just beginning.

You have the prosecutor who sent in a new team of detectives to resume the interrogation of a mentally disordered suspect because the first team was too tired to continue (and with instructions to get the statement "right" this time) (Rivera).

You have the detectives who got the suspect to admit she strangled her young son with an electrical cord before the ME said it was a mattress strap, and then they went back and had her correct that, no it was really the mattress strap, when she wasn't even there at the time and the whole thing was a horrible accident (Harris).

You have the guy who confessed to a killing that happened while he was in jail, and prosecutors who managed to cloud that issue during the trial, then more prosecutors who took more than a year to act when evidence came to them that the stuff their predecessors used to fudge the jail alibi issue was garbage (Taylor).

You have the guy Downstate who admitted to killing his little girl when the evidence identifying the real killer was a pair of shoes the cops had from day one (Fox).

Then how about the guy in the Northbrook case whom they interrogated in English when he spoke Korean, so they brought in a "translator" who was a fellow officer whose Korean was, in his own words, "not that great" (Koh).

You have prosecutors who, when presented with exonerating DNA evidence, say the suspect did it with others (Cruz), or that the DNA could have been transferred from a leaf in the forest or a hotel-room remote control (Hobbs, Rivera) or even an unidentified co-ejacualtor who was masturbating over the dead body (may be the Ryan Harris case, Alvarez didn't say).

I think the cops in all these cases were human beings and didn't set out to do wrong, but in wanting so badly to make a case, they lost their way, and in a few of the cases, they were not aided by the poor advice and guidance they got from the prosecutors, who, by and large, have not exactly stood between overzealous law enforcement and the public.

"You also have the lives of top flight detectives ruined. When other cops see detectives getting sued and their investigations dragged through mud in columns like the ones Zorn wrote about this case, policing suffers."

Cry me a river. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. You learned when you signed up that law enforcement is a delicate business. You're afraid to get sued? Step aside and we'll find people who are not afraid to do their jobs. Yes, cops get crapped on a lot and that stinks, but it's also a very good living with very good benefits and job security, more than a lot of us have.
It's enough for the rest of us to expect that you'll do the job and do it right and not whine and moan about lawsuits.

Hey, you do know what happens when you get sued? The city pays for your defense by hiring really aggressive lawyers from private firms that spend money like crazy with scorched-earth discovery tactics for months and months until the city finally settles because the case stank the day it came in the door. (Yes, I know, they do win one from time to time. But we are settling many, many of them.) So we get to pay that bill and then the bill for the scorched-earth stuff. Sorry, but the bath we're taking as taxpayers in these cases is a much bigger worry than your fragile sense of self worth.

As Mike Ditka would say, "stop cryin' about it." As Bob Prosky would say, "You don't want to work for me? What's wrong with you . . . . You got responsibilities. Tighten up and do it."

The detectives do not have the authority to determine whether or not the city settles. In many wrongful conviction cases the detectives desperately wanted to put their investigations in front of a jury. The Porter case was an exception. It was very close whether the city would settle. One reason they didn't is that the detectives fought so hard to keep it that way.

Your claim that the city fights these cases aggressively is seriously misinformed. The cops can take the heat. Let's see if the journalists can as many wrongful conviction claims unravel.

The detectives proved their investigation was legitimate in the Porter case. What was Zorn's response? He ridiculed the attorney who argued it, an attorney whose opinion had changed 180 degrees after he looked at the evidence. Even after this vindication, Zorn still argued publically a narrative of the case that had been refuted in court and by numerous witness allegations. Zorn continued to make these arguments even though many people pointed out to him they had been proven false.

Nobody likes getting sued. It is part of the job. But no one should have to bear being framed as part of their job.

One wonders about the people on the south side. They are the ones who have Anthony Porter living in their midst. Zorn's columns helped get him out because Zorn did not look at the evidence. He was too closely allied with the wrongful conviction advocates.

The Porter case is not unique.

Soon the Paris, Illinois exoneration of two people convicted of a double homicide will also see the light of day. The connections between that case and the Porter are striking, including an attempt to pin the murders on an innocent person.

Still, the journalists in Chicago will not look at the evidence in these cases. The Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize, in part because of their coverage of the Porter case. How humiliating when it comes out that they were completely wrong.

Good luck plugging your book, but I know what I have seen with my own eyes, including some of my own invoices caused by this behavior. There is a legion of exonerated because our system is broken, not because of journalists. By the way I will probably read your book, but it will be a library copy. You have a palpable bias. But I will keep an open mind to your conclusions, as irrelevant as they are to the issue at hand. And thanks for tacitly acknowledging my point about the unseemliness of claiming that the police can't do their job because of lawsuits.

Martin, we'll see if your predictions about Porter come to pass. I'll let Zorn respond to your allegations, as I don't remember enough of the specifics and you don't present any. In any event, that's one case. You can't make similar claims about all such cases and all such exonerations all across the country. A recurring theme in these cases is the false confession, as in the shameful Cruz example. It's my understanding that detectives look at a confession as the best evidence they could get, a slam dunk, and look at the very idea of false confessions with great skepticism and hostility. That's what the detective in the This American Life piece said. And yet, we *know* from years of experience and research -- yes, there are so many false confessions that you can do research on the phenomenon -- that false confessions *happen all the time.*

The belief that false confessions just don't happen absent coercion -- a belief that seems to common among police and prosecutors -- is premised on a common sense view that nobody would willingly confess to a serious crime they didn't commit. But that common sense view is just dead wrong. When that article of faith is proved wrong by reality and experience, some, like the detective in the NPR story, change their tune (to their credit). Many more, it seems, perhaps like Martin, stubbornly stick to the party line.

What case after case shows is that people who falsely confess *don't understand that it's forever.* They don't get that they'll never be able to take it back. They just want to go home (something they're sometimes promised, as interrogators are permitted to tell such lies), and so they say what they think the interrogator wants to hear. This is more likely to happen when the person has a very low IQ and has been interrogated for a long period of time, enduring sustained (albeit legal) pressure. But it can also happen, as in the This American Life case, when the person is just very naive. Look, if suspects were savvy, there would never be any confessions at all, true or false. Suspects would just ask for a lawyer, the lawyer would tell them not to say another word, and that would be it. The police would have to build the case based on other evidence, without the help of the confession. But they're not savvy, of course. They respond to pressure and coaxing and don't appreciate the import of what they're doing. It's time for police and prosecutors to make peace with the genuine phenomenon of false confessions, rather than fighting it at every turn, always insisting that the first theory was correct to the bitter end. A professional policeman committed to serving justice and the community would appreciate these revelations and think about how to prevent false confessions, rather than hunker down and whine dubiously about persecution by journalists.

Hey Martin, your comment about the Paris case piqued my interest. Care to elaborate? That is quite an allegation you make there, but one that apologists for our broken system have made before. Is it your position that the two drunks who implicated Steidl and Whitlock were credible and were not manipulated? That we should have believed the jailhouse snitch? That the broken lamp was broken during the crime and not by firefighters? I have found these case to be complicated so I would listen, but if you are going to throw bombs like that around, I think you have to back it up.

Jake, Those are good points. Yes, I can make similar connections because they are right there. The manner in which wrongful conviction advocates suddenly find a witness or inmate to recant is common theme in their cases. How difficult is it to go into the prisons, tell the inmates that if they change their story they could get out or they could make money or they could get back at the cops? This is their modus operendi. It is most apparent in the Porter case, but it is present in the Madison Hobley case, Ronald Kitchen, Darryl Cannon and others. Ask Alstory Simon about coerced confessions. The thugs are a lot more savvy than you give them credit for. They tried to claim Porter had too low an IQ to be executed, yet he fooled everyone and got out of prison and he was guilty. It's time for police and prosecutors to make peace...What a load of nonsense. It's time for journalists like Zorn who never even bother to check the evidence to see that many of these cases aren't wrongful convictions at all.

BTW I got around to clicking on that link. Keeping a very open mind, again, because these cases can be complicated, I found the blog entry very unpersuasive. So some self-appointed investigator has an out-there theory that a Texas hit man did it, and there's some vague reference in there to a Paris businessman as an alternative suspect. I did not get the sense that the bloggers are onto anything solid to establish that the exoneration of Steidl and Whitlock was a fraud, or that journalists exaggerated, or anything like that.

I persist with this because you've put your credibility out there, Martin, and what you did was sort of hijack the thread with a red herring that we ought to be more concerned about rogue journalists than rogue cops and prosecutors, and with that I wholeheartedly disagree, because the record establishes otherwise. Then you tried to suggest that the record isn't as clear as I say it is because there is more than one exoneration case that you think will fall apart, but Steidl doesn't look close to doing that, and we're waiting I guess on your Porter book to see how all that shakes out, but you don't build credibility by citing a second case to say there's a broader problem and then we look and see there's nothing to that second case.

I feel a little bit like a judge ruling on one of these PC petitions, even a good one, and finding reasons to deny it because of the sheer inertia that goes along with a jury's verdict of guilty. It takes a whole lot to reverse one of those and to free an "exonerated" person, so once one of those things happens (just one -- of course there have been MANY), that has some inertia as well. A court or the state itself finds that a wrong was done, and then the folks involved in doing the wrong say no, we had it right, look at this again ... well, I'm very disinclined to do that. I need a lot of evidence to do that. Like I needed a lot of evidence to hold that a conviction was wrongful.

On top of that, I worry that you and your camp have an agenda that is not necessarily consistent with truth-finding. You want to vindicate the cops and prosecutors whom you think have been wrongly maligned. You want to put "the kids" in their place. You'd like to see Zorn get a comeuppance, and if you can prove he was wrong about Porter, you'll try to get mileage out of that beyond the Porter case. You would like to derail the entire wrongful conviction movement, because you view it as an anti-police, anti-law enforcement movement, and sure there are some elements of that in there, but the vast majority of pro bono lawyers I've known in these cases are simply out to get justice. The form of justice you are seeking is a little bit different.

So as I said earlier, a palpable bias. But unlike some, I for one welcome whatever scrutiny you want to give to these cases because we can only learn more. Maybe I will agree with you, maybe not, but I don't think anyone can fault you to the extent you want to further discussion about wrongful conviction cases. That is a good discussion that we all should be having, as honest brokers.

GJOL: First rule of good writing: write to express, not impress. You are a true Zorn disciple. Everything you do and say is the product of a sincere quest for the truth. You don't even know me or know the cases and I'm a lowly biased cop.

You're going to have to learn a new song.

Zorn's transgressions in the Porter case and many others contradicts this strategy. Why don't you contact the builders of that Paris Illinois website and talk to them directly? Why not stop pluming your feathers about how open minded and courageous you are and do some simple investigation? If Zorn had done that, a killer wouldn't be walking the streets and an innocent man wasting away in prison and lives of two superb detectives would not have had to endure the nightmare the Innocence Project imposed upon their lives.

My motives and integrity will stand up to anyone in the wrongful conviction movement. At least I spoke to all the parties involved in the case. Zorn didn't. Why not quit your yapping and do some investigation yourself? Why not contact the hosts of the Paris Illinois website and see what they have to say?

Now you are getting churlish, and it is showing your true colors. You are proving my point. Didn't I say I welcomed your investigation? And hey, you were the one who brought up the Steidl case and cited to some goofy website that said nothing. Maybe you ought to investigate it. You threw the grenade, dud that it was.

And thanks also for the writing tips; I will, uh, take those to heart. Writing is something I know nothing about.

ZORN REPLY -- Officer Preib says and has said for many years that he's working on a book on all this, and I've told him I'll be interested to read it when it comes out. We're going back some now, but I read the entire case file on Porter including the trial transcript, and that included the reports and testimony of the officers with relevant information. Yes, I didn't re-interview them. Nor, if they had anything additional to add that for some reason wasn't in their reports or testimony, did they ever reach out to me in the course of my reporting on the issue at the time. So for Preib to imply that I put on blinders in looking at this case is simply false.
I have conceded-- I do concede -- that I should have recognized and raised alarms about the inappropriateness of Alstory Simon being represented during his guilty plea by an attorney with such close ties to the man who obtained the confession. That was simply an oversight on my part, though I'll add I was hardly alone. Not once during the pendency of his plea or even in the months afterward did ANYONE from the police department, the prosecutors' office or Simon's family contact me or any other journalist I'm aware of to say "Hey, wait a sec' ..."
I have since recognized this representation was, on its face, a conflict and have called repeatedly for the courts to allow Simon to withdraw his plea and proceed to trial with new, independent counsel.
This isn't good enough for Prieb, and I'm confident he'll explain why in his book.
As for the Paris case, I'm quite aware that Dan Curry (former mouthpiece for former DuPage County State's Attorney Jim Ryan, longtime defender of the Cruz/Hernandez prosecution) has co-launched an effort paid for by an anonymous funder in order, he says, to clear the name of a Paris-area businessman whose name got muddied up and bandied about by others who looked into that now 27-year-old double murder..
From the "about" page -- "We will not defend the original prosecution of Steidl and Whitlock, which we had nothing to do with and we acknowledge was far from ideal. We will not definitively solve the mystery of who killed Dyke and Karen but we are certain who did not."

G'JOL-
I help run the Paris site. Your reference to the "self-appointed" investigator with "an out there" theory is funny.....If that investigator was unimportant in this case, why did numerous media outlets pick up his affidavit and write about it, as absurd as it was?

The answer: Because the media has been covering only one side of this story for some time. It's time the other side be told. Hence the website.

That "out-there" investigator you are talking about is behind some of the goofy theories that ended up on national TV. So while what he has to say it not plausible in many respects, tell that to the media that prints what he has to say without question.

"Far from ideal." That's funny. Yes, it certainly is "far from ideal" to convict innocent people based on horse manure evidence including jailhouse snitches, drunks, and people who change their stories more often than they change their underwear.

So let me see, if I am defending somebody and I come up with an alternative suspect, and the case against my client falls apart for whatever reason (like, it's horse manure), the effort by an alternative suspect to "clear his name" would mean that I was unscrupulous, attempted to frame an innocent person, etc., and that the prosecution was righteous. I will try to keep that in mind. Better yet, next time I will just roll over. Who needs a defense? They are all guilty anyway.

So you make frequent phone calls to David Protess and his “warrior students,” but expect the cops to come talk to you? That's your argument? Then after the cops were exonerated in the civil trial, a trial that argued Porter was the killer, you expected them to call you up after you and Mills wrote article after article about what crusading heroes Protess and his students were.

You're supposed to pick the phone, Eric. That's what journalists do. You’re supposed to get both sides of a story. At the time of Porter's exoneration, how often were you speaking to Protess and his students?

You read the entire file? Let me ask you a question. If the detectives questioned two witnesses discovered at the scene and they provided a narrative, then they returned to the scene many hours later and discovered new witnesses that provided the exact same narrative as the original witnesses, down to the detail that Porter fired from his left hand, how then could the statements of the original witnesses be false? How could they be coerced? It's impossible. The independent witnesses in the case proved they were all telling the truth. That's how the detectives knew it was such an open and shut case.

All the other claims by Protess and the students fall apart on this fact as well. They argued the witnesses could not have seen what they claimed they saw because their view was blocked. How then did separate witnesses provide the exact same narrative? You can't claim the detectives made up this testimony or coerced from the second group because it was the ASA's decision to return to the park and the witnesses made these statements in front of the ASA.

You read all the transcripts? When Protess and McCann admitted in the Grand Jury hearing that they never even bothered to interview the second group of witnesses, it didn't strike you as suspicious? It didn't strike you as something worth looking into? A group of so called journalists claim they have uncovered a monumental wrongful conviction and then they admit, under oath, they didn't talk to four of six witnesses? This didn’t trouble you? The prosecutor saw it. He slammed Protess and McCann over this negligence. Of course, Protess and the students never talked to the detectives either. So much for journalists or journalist wannabees getting both side of the story. Did you ever ask Protess or Ciolino if they spoke to the detectives?

Then there is your conduct after the civil trial. You insisted that Porter was innocent after the jury reviewed the case and exonerated the detectives. This goes down as one of the most despicable acts by a journalist in the city's history. Here these cops had just spent five years busting their ass to prove their credibility and you didn't even explore why the jury ruled as it did. Did you even sit through the trial and listen to the evidence before you announced someone was guilty or innocent? Did you? You wrote an article condemning Jones merely for asserting what he had just proved in court. This was a prime opportunity for you to look into the case. When did the Tribune start condemning people merely for expressing their opinion? When did a journalist walk over to another lawyer and suggest a lawsuit over it? Why don’t you explain your conduct that day?

It didn't dawn on you in 2005 after this trial to talk to Simon and hear his story? It didn't dawn on you to talk to the detectives or look up Walter Jones after all of the appeals in the civil trial were exhausted? Simon was telling the media his confession was coerced. Sotos was blasting the case. The detectives were arguing Porter was the killer. Then in 2011 when the you know what hit the fan for Protess and Northwestern stated he had lied about his investigations, you still didn't look more deeply into the case. Bill Crawford investigated and saw what Walter Jones and every cop who worked that night knew: Porter was the killer. You ridiculed Crawford.

Yeah, Eric, you did a real thorough job.

I'm so sick of you describing the fact that Ciolino getting a lawyer for Simon as "inappropriate." It's an elemental, egregious violation of civil rights. Any cops who did something remotely close to this would have the case tossed and face charges. That's what you would be calling for if the police did something like this, but you typically soft peddle it when it is one of the heroes of the wrongful conviction movement you toast in your columns, a clear indication of your intense bias.

Your tired, pathetic tactic of dismissing people because they disagree with your politics is nauseating. Dan Curry is a mouthpiece for Jim Ryan, so we can't listen to him, right? What about you? Aren't you a mouthpiece for David Protess and the Innocence Project, whom you "toasted" in a column. Didn’t Protess leave Northwestern under the cloud of scandal?

Simon did too reach out to people while he was in the county to get rid of Rimland and get another lawyer and plead not guilty. You would know this if you looked into it. If you got off the phone to Protess and went to the county jail to interview him, he probably would have told you. You’ve only had 13 years to talk to him. If you didn’t spend so much time creating arguments to defend your actions, you might have gotten to the bottom of this case a long time ago. But for some reason, the entire Chicago media community never observed this glaring violation of Simon's rights when Ciolino got him Rimland. One out of state journalist was troubled by it and looked into it.

I know you're aching to see when my book comes out, aching to find something in it you can hang me on. That is what you and Mills and the wrongful conviction movement do. If anyone disagrees with you, if anyone contradicts you, there is nothing you won't do. Look at the detectives in the Porter case. Look at Alstory Simon. Look at what you said about Sotos and Bill Crawford in your columns. Now the evidence is coming out, and coming out fast, that they were right all along. Good luck trying to paint yourself as some duped truth seeker on this one. I don't think you're going to get away with it.

ZORN REPLY -- As I said before, Martin, I'll look forward to the publication of your book. Meanwhile, the state's attorneys office had this matter between Simon's arrest and his plea and, in fact, still has the matter. Are you saying things here they're not aware of? If not, aren't you barking up the wrong tree?
I've called for the courts to allow Simon to withdraw his plea under the circumstances --- did ANYONE from the original case raise ANY alarms about Simon's representation or his plea to ANYONE between his arrest and whatever day it was he finally decided the "game" was up and he wanted to withdraw it?
Your obsession with the media here is obvious -- anyone who's reading this thread any more can tell that you're out to discredit the media that has shone such a harsh light on some members of law enforcement over the years --- but what about the police and prosecutors? Northwestern University and the Chicago Tribune didn't charge, accept the plea from and sentence Alstory Simon. David Protess didn't deny Simon's appeal? Eric Zorn isn't fighting Simon's effort to withdraw his plea.
I'm done now. Last rant is yours.

---I know this sounds snotty, so I apologize in advance and I already have you so mad at me, but is there a contract for this book? It is really coming out or is that something you just keep saying? I suppose I'm surprised there's a market for it because the author is so agenda-driven and mean-spirited, I mean, who would really believe him at this point even if he's got a good story to tell. We used to say you can't be a joiner and be a reporter. You can't cover the circus if you have slept with the elephants. So somebody who put his name on an ARDC complaint in this matter, kind of a joiner.

Sorry, just askin'. Maybe you could ghost-write it so people wouldn't really know about the bias? I don't know. Good luck, Martin. I hope you do publish it.

It would be nice if you would answer some of the questions that have been posed to you.

Let's review all your articles from this period and see the constant contact you had with Protess, Ciolino and the students at Nothwestern, your "warriors." The point remains the same: You were in constant contact with them and gave full voice to them in your writing and made no contact with the detectives, Alstory Simon or Walter Jones, not at the time Alstory was in the county or 13 years since he's been in the joint.

Why don't you answer the question about the detectives finding independent witnesses who confirmed each other's stories? The Porter was a running joke among ever cop who worked that night, because they knew these simple facts.

Most incredibly, you helped transform a sociopathic killer into a kind of folk hero in the public imagination.

A toast to you for this.

You say you have read the transcripts, but you ignored all the blatant contradictions in the Northwestern story from the outset. You ignored the bombshells dropped in the Grand Jury hearings.

Even as recently as a few summers ago, you were at the Printer's Row book fair commenting on the Porter case, asserting that the central witness, William Taylor, recanted his eyewitness testimony, blatantly ignoring the fact that Taylor admitted under oath that the only reason he changed his statement was that he was tired of being harassed by Northwestern investigators, a clear indication of coercion.

The perverse obsession here is yours, not mine. You were so obsessed with Protess and the Innocence Project you failed to see all the holes in the case that so many other people saw, many of whom attempted to bring them to your attention. Your response, you called into question their intentions. With Jones you went further. You suggested that he be sued for questioning the Northwestern narrative. How do you explain this conduct?

There's plenty of blame to go around in this case, including the state's attorney, but right now we are talking about you and what you did and didn't do. This travesty could not have taken place without the Chicago media laying down on the job and the pressure yours and other misinformed, misguided and unclarified articles threw at the case and at prosecutors.

You claim I have an obsession with the Chicago media. This is your standard rhetorical trick you use against anyone who disagrees with you: you question their intentions and assert their bias. I have a deep love of journalism. I just like it when it is fair, or at least tries to be.

At least I spoke to all sides in this case. Why didn't you? What does that say about my intentions and yours?

I would love to play you the recording of my interview with Walter Jones and let you hear what he had to say about your coverage of this story. But then, somehow you would construct some theory about his intentions and bias and claim yours are altruistic in comparison.

You don't need me to discredit the Chicago media. You've done a pretty solid job of that yourself. My intentions and actions are every bit as legitimate as yours. Your questioning of mine is just a measure of your arrogance, your pretentiousness and your utter absence of class.

You are right that I am obsessed about this case. It is an incredible story what happened, absolutely incredible. And once again, you fail to ask the central question that comes from it: If this case was so screwed up, how many others were?

The size of the readership. Same for this thread right now as for "So Much Vitriol, So Little Time: One Cop's Grudge Against (fill in the blank)." I wonder what an agent would think about the foot you have put forward here to promote this nonfiction masterpiece.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.